"It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life, that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright mental defectives. These things were true to some extent, in fact, to a considerable extent with some of us. But we are sure that our bodies were sickened as well."
The Doctor's Opinion

“Someone had pushed a drink my way, and I had taken it. Was I crazy? I began to wonder, for such an appalling lack of perspective seemed near being just that.”
Page 5, Bill’s story

"A doctor came with a heavy sedative. next day found me drinking both gin and sedative. This combination soon landed me on the rocks. People feared for my sanity. So did I." [Clinical insanity seen as a possible result of alcoholism and drug abuse, not the cause]
Page 6-7, Bill’s story

“Trembling, I stepped from the hospital a broken man. Fear sobered me for a bit. Then came the insidious insanity of that first drink, and on Armistice Day 1934, I was off again.”
Page 8, Bill’s Story

"Here is a fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking. He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk... He is often perfectly sensible and well balanced concerning everything except liquor, but in that respect he is incredibly dishonest and selfish. He often possesses special abilities, skills, and aptitudes, and has a promising career ahead of him. He uses his gifts to build up a bright outlook for his family and himself, and then pulls the structure down on his head by a senseless series of sprees. He is the fellow who goes to bed so intoxicated he ought to sleep the clock around. Yet early next morning he searches madly for the bottle he misplaced the night before."
Page 21-2, There is a Solution

“When this sort of thinking is fully established in an individual with alcoholic tendencies, he has probably placed himself beyond human aid, and unless locked up, may go permanently insane.” [Clinical insanity seen as a possible result of alcoholism, not the cause]

“The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this delusion is astonishing. Many pursue it to the gates of insanity or death.” [Clinical insanity seen as a possible result of alcoholism, not the cause]
Page 30, More About Alcoholism

“We doubt if many of them can do it [quit on their own will power], because none of them really want to stop, and hardly any of them, because of the peculiar mental twist already acquired, will find he can win out.”
Page 33, More About Alcoholism

“He had much knowledge of himself as an alcoholic. Yet all reasons for not drinking were easily pushed aside in favor of the foolish idea that he could take whiskey if only he mixed it with milk!

“Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity.”
Page 36-37, More About Alcoholism

“But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink. Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out.”
Page 37, More About Alcoholism

“But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened.”
Page 37, More About Alcoholism

“However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane.”
Page 38, More About Alcoholism

“I rather appreciated your ideas about the subtle insanity which precedes the first drink, but I was confident it could not happen to me after what I had learned.”
Page 40, More About Alcoholism

“Seemingly he could not drink even if he would. God had restored his sanity.”
Page 57, We Agnostics

“We have ceased fighting anything or anyone – even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically.”
Page 85, Into Action, Step Ten

"Show him [the newcomer] the mental twist which leads to the first drink."

"Show him [a new prospect], from your own experience, how the queer mental condition surrounding that first drink prevents normal functioning of the will power."
Page 92, Working With Others

"You should not be offended if he [a new prospect] wants to call it off, for he has helped you more than you have helped him. If your talk has been sane, quiet and full of human understanding, you have perhaps made a friend."
Page 94, Working With Others

“We have found nothing incompatible between a powerful spiritual experience and a life of sane and happy usefulness.”

"In a weak moment he may take your dislike of his high-stepping [undisciplined] friends as one of those insanely trivial excuses to drink."
Page 120, To Wives

“Nothing will help the man who is of on a spiritual tangent so much as the wife who adopts a sane spiritual program, making a better practical use of it.”
Page 130, The Family Afterward

12 & 12:

“The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us: first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and then by an allergy of the body than insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process.”
Page 22, Step 1

“Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality, can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves 'problem drinkers,' but cannot endure the suggestion that they are in fact mentally ill. They are abetted in this blindness by a world which does not understand the difference between sane drinking and alcoholism. 'Sanity' is defined as "soundness of mind." Yet no alcoholic, soberly analyzing his destructive behavior, whether the destruction fell on the dining-room furniture or his own moral fiber, can claim 'soundness of mind' for himself.”
Page 33, Step Two